R-Parity violating flavor symmetries, recent neutrino data and absolute neutrino mass scale

We study the role of a very general type of flavor symmetry in controlling the strength of R-parity violation in supersymmetric models. We assume that only leptons are charged under a global symmetry whose breaking induces lepton number (and, hence, R-parity) violation. The charge assignments of leptons under this symmetry are such that the total number of independent lepton number violating couplings is reduced from 39 to 6. The most severe constraints on these flavor-correlated couplings arise from neutrino masses and mixing as well as from the non-observation of K_L -> e\mu. We find that such a scenario predicts an almost vanishing smallest neutrino mass eigenvalue, allowing the upcoming generation of neutrinoless double beta decay experiments to shed light on the hierarchy.Comment: 9 page

Lensing Bias to CMB Measurements of Compensated Isocurvature Perturbations

Compensated isocurvature perturbations (CIPs) are modes in which the baryon and dark matter density fluctuations cancel. They arise in the curvaton scenario as well as some models of baryogenesis. While they leave no observable effects on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at linear order, they do spatially modulate two-point CMB statistics and can be reconstructed in a manner similar to gravitational lensing. Due to the similarity between the effects of CMB lensing and CIPs, lensing contributes nearly Gaussian random noise to the CIP estimator that approximately doubles the reconstruction noise power. Additionally, the cross correlation between lensing and the integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect generates a correlation between the CIP estimator and the temperature field even in the absence of a correlated CIP signal. For cosmic-variance limited temperature measurements out to multipoles $l \leq 2500$, subtracting a fixed lensing bias degrades the detection threshold for CIPs by a factor of $1.3$, whether or not they are correlated with the adiabatic mode.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures; one of the authors Chen He Heinrich was previously known as Chen H

Southern enlargement of the European Union and capital account liberalization: Lessons for Central and Eastern Europe

The integration of the central and eastern European countries into the international capital markets has been and will be determined by the process of European Union (EU) integration. Our analysis shows that southern and eastern European countries already appear to be surprisingly similar regarding FDI flows from EU members. The central and eastern European countries, however, are likely to attract increased portfolio flows in the years to come. We argue that membership alone in a regional arrangement like the EU is neither sufficient for sustained capital inflows nor is it the guarantee for increased investment activities. Rather, domestic economic policy has to change in accordance: Liberalization matters, not only membership.Capital Account Liberalization,European Union Enlargement,Capital Flows,Eastern Europe,Economic Growth

THE WRITING ON THE SCREEN: IMAGES OF TEXT IN THE GERMAN CINEMA FROM 1920 TO 1949

By establishing a crucial figural relation between image and text in the cinema, this dissertation offers a detailed analysis of the uses of writing through select canonical works of a significant period in the history of the German cinema. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory and Gilles Deleuze's conceptions of the cinematic image, as well as a Derridean definition of writing, I argue that instances of written text in images of the German cinema are social hieroglyphs rendered as allegorical gestures, which inscribe questions of authority in the form of grammatological constellations within the movement of images. These hieroglyphic configurations, spelled out as writing on the screen, stand in reference to specific modalities which affirm the presence of a larger organizational regime of truth. Instances of writing thus constitute the inscriptions through which such structures of power acquire legibility and, conversely, become visible. Ultimately, this figural regime delineates questions of the political constitution of the state because the struggle for authority and its legitimacy as an organizational system become embodied in allegorical forms of writing that inscribe the body politic into filmic texts as subject positions. This approach is predicated on a subjunctive dimension that redefines the intrinsic relation of the text to its "outside." Chapters discuss the figure of authority in "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Kameradschaft," circularity in Fritz Lang's "M" and his "Mabuse" films, titles and writing in early Weimar film censorship decisions, the star figure of Emil Jannings in the Nazi film "Ohm Krüger," and the postwar films "Die Mörder Sind Unter Uns" and "Rotation." An epilogue investigates the reconfigurations of writing on the screen in R.W. Fassbinder's "Die Dritte Generation" (1979) and the 1998 hacker film "23". In all of these case studies, I contend that writing in film remains significant when the image as such must be augmented by gestures toward a figural language

Apparent Opacity Affects Perception of Structure from Motion

The judgment of surface attributes such as transparency or opacity is often considered to be a higher-level visual process that would make use of low-level stereo or motion information to tease apart the transparent from the opaque parts. In this study, we describe a new illusion and some results that question the above view by showing that depth from transparency and opacity can override the rigidity bias in perceiving depth from motion. This provides support for the idea that the brain's computation of the surface material attribute of transparency may have to be done either before, or in parallel with the computation of structure from motion

Consumer Brand Relationships Research: A Bibliometric Citation Meta-Analysis

This study examines how scholarly research on consumer brand relationships has evolved over the last decades by conducting a bibliometric citation meta-analysis. The bibliography was compiled using the ISI Web of Science database. The literature review includes 392 papers by 685 authors in 101 journals. The area of consumer brand relationships research is notably interdisciplinary, with articles mainly published in journals for business and management, but also applied psychology and communication. We show the impact of universities, authors, journals, and key articles and outline possible future research avenues. The study explores seven sub-research streams and visualizes how articles on consumer brand relationships build on each other using co-citation mapping technique. Based on the results of this analysis we propose an agenda for future research that offers the potential to advance research on the relationships between consumers and brands

Consumer Brand Relationships Landscape

This article sheds light on the current state of research on consumer brand relationships (CBR) and presents two distinct taxonomies, respectively, theoretical frameworks that help to classify CBR research. First, the \u27brand connection matrix\u27 that classifies brand relationships into functional-based (low versus high) and emotional-based (low versus high) connections to brands. This framework leads us with a 2 × 2 matrix consisting of four quadrants, each of which are discussed. Second, the \u27brand feeling matrix\u27 classifies consumer\u27s relationships with brands by grouping them into the strengths of relationships (weak versus strong) and the consumers\u27 feeling toward the brand (positive versus negative). The latter taxonomy leads to another 2 × 2 matrix where each of the four quadrants is discussed. Finally, this article discusses the papers in this special issue and applies the two frameworks by grouping the papers into the corresponding quadrants

Negation as Cancellation, Connexive Logic, and qLPm

In this paper, we shall consider the so-called cancellation view of negation and the inferential role of contradictions. We will discuss some of the problematic aspects of negation as cancellation, such as its original presentation by Richard and Valery Routley and its role in motivating connexive logic. Furthermore, we will show that the idea of inferential ineffectiveness of contradictions can be conceptually separated from the cancellation model of negation by developing a system we call qLPm, a combination of Graham Priest’s minimally inconsistent Logic of Paradox with q-entailment (quasi-entailment) as introduced by Grzegorz Malinowski